Administrative:How to Contribute to VygisStories Master Class
Author: Charles Dickson (C3PO) If you want to do more than write stories and upload photos, if you want to help add to the structure of VygisStories, your help will be greatly appreciated. You may simply enjoy the process of linking your content into the greater structure here and want to create new links. However, to do this, you will need to learn a few tips and tricks. Depending on how fancy you want to get, you will have to do some things which bend the software behind this Wiki to our will. This "Master Class" guide page is for: * Those who want to just do their page editing and markup manually * Those who want to follow the style guide when you make a page * Those who want to add new categories and expand the museum section of the wiki. Why Is There A Style Guide? Wikia lets people build wikis just about any way they want to. I've chosen to implement a system of Category tags and page naming styles that hold VygisStories together in a specific way. The payoff is that tables of contents fall out of this system that make it possible to view the stories in the wiki from several different perspectives, and this also helps keep the vast numbers of pages that we will need organized. The plan for doing this is on my "Organization of the Wiki" page: * Organization of the VygisStories Wiki Basically I'm making the organization of the wiki a little like the organization of a museum. Things, people, places, dates etc are imported into the wiki as individual pages of their own. They are like the "things" in a museum. For these museum object pages I am using a special type of page defined in the wiki software as "Category" pages. Category pages have a special property in the wiki that tags can be added to regular pages that have the names of category pages. This creates a link from the tag to the Category page. Furthermore, every regular page that has a tag matching a category page automatically gets a link back to it added to the category page. Thus the category pages become a way of browsing regular pages tagged with categories. The plan is that we can add either regular pages, which are the stories, or we can add category pages that contain specific things, people, places, dates, etc. When peoples' stories are added to the wiki, their stories can be tagged with references to the Category pages. Category pages can in turn have tags to other category pages, which makes it possible organize Category pages into hierarchies. This provides a way of organizing the hundreds, probably thousands of our "museum" items. In our wiki, every museum item will have its own category page, and those category pages will each have a link to one out of of a set of top-level grouping category pages. The top-level categories that I've established include People, Things, Places, Jobs, Pets, Interests, Traditions, Mythologies, Year, Date, and Author. Each new Category page that is created should get placed into one of these group categories, which together serve as the tables of contents of the entire wiki. There is also a "Stories" category that all regular pages should be added to. The Wikia software makes it possible to build up these kinds of links, but it does require some care to make it all work. The hierarchy system that has been established to organize the categories in Vygisstories is completely artificial. In Wikia there are only two types of pages, regular pages and Category pages. All Category pages are the same type of page; Wikia allows Categories to contain other categories, but there is nothing built-in to distinguish a category from a sub-category. It is only by establishing and maintaining this system of links that we can make it hierarchical. Thus it is possible for our hierarchical structure to get confused if care is not taken. Another issue is that, being text-based, Category tags in Wikia have to be typed correctly to all link up. It is possible to enter a Category tag that looks correct but due to an extra space or misspelled word does not actually link to the intended Category page. The Wikia software for some reason makes it difficult to spot and fix this type of problem; if you enter a bad tag it automatically creates a link to a new empty page with the erroneous name. This feature makes it quick to intentionally create new categories, which is obviously why it was implemented, but it also makes it tricky to find and eliminate bad links. The main way to prevent creation of bad links is to rely whenever possible on an autocompletion feature in Wikia when entering tags. When entering a category tag for a page, Wikia will begin displaying existing tags which match up to the characters that have been typed so far. Their algorithm is not perfect or as powerful as, say, Google's, and there are unfortunate quirks to it that a user has to patiently be prepared for. But the majority of times a tag should be added to a page using the autocompletion feature. The style guide for this wiki provides a set of rules for naming pages because the names of Category pages are the tags that are used to make the links that become the tables of contents. There are not many rules, but keeping naming consistent ensures that the way the links are alphabetized by the Wikia software works properly, that the autocompletion feature for adding links works smoothly, and that there's always a consistent way to add new stuff.